It’s not that there aren’t some good arguments in favor of the Electoral College. The problem is that, no matter what those good arguments are, whenever there is a mismatch between the candidate who wins the popular vote and the candidate who wins the majority of electoral votes, we are left in the awkward position of having to explain why it’s okay that the candidate who won the most votes did not win the presidency.

This is a most basic pillar of democratic elections: in a single seat race, the candidate who wins a majority of the votes wins the seat. When the people are endowed with sovereignty, that sovereignty should be offered equally to all voters. The Electoral College violates these principles.

The Electoral College is an anachronistic institution developed in the dawn of an 18th century agrarian country, under a no-longer-applicable theory that electors would be better informed and wiser than the general populace (rather than the party loyalists chosen today), and mathematically structured to favor slave-holding states (by including 3/5th of the slave populations in the apportionment of political power to states).

Whatever else is said of Hillary Clinton’s historic but failed campaign for the presidency, she not only won the second-highest number of raw votes (the highest being the current president in 2008), but also looks on track to have won over one million votes more than her opponent. That’s over one million voters whose votes did not count as much as the oppositions’. This is no longer a stable or tenable situation for a 21st century democratic republic.

The Electoral College must be ended in favor of a direct national popular vote. This should be a plank in the platform of the only major political party of good governance, the Democratic Party.

It is to deny what the history of the world tells us is true, to suppose that men of ambition and talents will not continue to spring up amongst us. And when they do, they will as naturally seek the gratification of their ruling passion as others have done before them. The question then is, Can that gratification be found in supporting and maintaining an edifice that has been erected by others? Most certainly it cannot. Many great and good men, sufficiently qualified for any task they should undertake, may ever be found whose ambition would aspire to nothing beyond a seat in Congress, a gubernatorial or a presidential chair; but such belong not to the family of the lion or the tribe of the eagle. What! think you these places would satisfy an Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon? Never! Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored. It sees no distinction in adding story to story upon the monuments of fame erected to the memory of others. It denies that it is glory enough to serve under any chief. It scorns to tread in the footsteps of any predecessor, however illustrious. It thirsts and burns for distinction; and if possible, it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves or enslaving freemen. Is it unreasonable, then, to expect that some man possessed of the loftiest genius, coupled with ambition sufficient to push it to its utmost stretch, will at some time spring up among us? And when such an one does, it will require the people to be united with each other, attached to the government and laws, and generally intelligent, to successfully frustrate his designs. Distinction will be his paramount object, and although he would as willingly, perhaps more so, acquire it by doing good as harm, yet, that opportunity being past, and nothing left to be done in the way of building up, he would set boldly to the task of pulling down.

For all their faults, one thing that the “unwinnable” wars like the War on Poverty and the War on Drugs had is a relatively clear definition of purpose.

I know, for all intents and purposes, what the goal is in a war on poverty, or on illegal drugs, or even a war on terror. Today’s big policy agendas, while perhaps setting some more realistic goals, seem to lack that clarity of purpose.

I was briefly distracted by concern over the “safe space” movement and the apparently increasing inability of (partially) college-educated students to tolerate dissenting opinions.

Then I realized we have a presidential candidate leading the polls of a major party who has advocated for the following things:

Making certain citizens and residents of the US carry documents that identify their religion.

Closing down places of worship based on their religious affiliation.

Vigilante violence at his campaign events.

Closing the borders to all visitors to the US based on their religion.

Imposing restrictions on (and/or a complete shutdown of) Internet access to indeterminate people and places in the US under the rubric of safety, without any regard to First Amendment concerns.

Open to considering internment of Americans akin to the Japanese Internment camps of World War II.

It is increasingly difficult to give much priority of thought to things like a student journalist forced to leave a public protest area or Yale professors caught up in a dispute over Halloween costume sensitivities.

Don’t get me wrong, these issues matter, and if allowed to expand don’t bode well for future political discourse. But that danger is for the future, and anyway, student activists tend to moderate their views as they experience adulthood.

Meanwhile, in the present, we have a billionaire reality show huckster stirring up the worst traditions of populism and nativism who has formed a group of increasingly violent supporters who stroll willingly down the path to outright fascism.

Every September 11 in the United States, we are besieged with exhortations to remember the eponymous terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center. These come in many forms, from the innocent social media posts of our friends and relatives and celebrities to the cynical ramblings of pundits and politicians who hope to convert their sanctimony into power.

I have always felt uncomfortable during public moments of silence. The moment of silence is an inherently coercive institution. It is the secular replacement for public prayer, but at least with a public prayer, I— the godless unbeliever— am left free to abstain from participation and to respectively collect my own thoughts. A moment of silence, however, demands all those present to participate or to disrupt. You are free to think as subversively as you like, of course— after all, we are not Communists— but you dare not make a peep about it. This is not the time for that.

Does the moment of silence engender thoughtful reflection on the state of the world leading to and following from the 9/11 attacks? No— it inculcates a deference to authority. Authority has deemed this moment as a time of silence. If you don’t obey, it is not the authority who will punish you, but the stunned and angry reactions of the crowd. The speaker (or no-speaker, if you will) thus holds the crowd in thrall.

It all seems innocent enough. What danger is a one or two minute moment of quiet? And really, in isolation, it is of little danger. We are all showing our respects to the dead, to the wounded. But it is never in isolation for public events like this. It is repeated. It has been a month, a year, two years, ten years, 14 years. It is at the beginning of inquests and ceremonies. It is never spontaneous. No crowd of hundreds, not even a crowd of ten, decides as one to suddenly enter a period of silent reflection. We are always called to it, and the person calling it is always the figurehead of some establishment, the establishment. It is in the establishment’s interest to make you think that your silence is the best way to honor the dead. While you are silent, they are organizing agendas and issuing orders. And if you raise questions during these moments, you are an asshole, a suppressive, a traitor.

We have been in an extended moment of silence since shortly after the attacks, when we meekly turned to any leader who could make sense of the tragedy for us. These were politicians who were capable of wrapping their own agenda in a tattered American flag, Very Important People who dressed their sociopathy up as righteousness, demagogues who turned our unity in shock to unity in fear and anger, and then marched one generation off to war and another generation off to shopping centers. And if you had anything to say about that, then fuck you, go live with the Taliban!

The moments of silence for 9/11 have waned in the past decade. That spell is perhaps fading. What persists now among us is an almost overwhelming desire to share our personal part in the tragedy, regardless of how far removed we actually were from it. Each of us has an experience-turned-perspective on the events, and want to share it with each other.

While these individual stories vary widely in their degree of sincerity, all but a few truly thoughtful gems tend to share a common theme: September 11 is a day of mourning, a day to be sad, a day to be mindful and vigilant, because a great tragedy befell our nation lo those fourteen years ago. We remind each other to “never forget”, as if the death of 3,000 humans in a day set a new pivot in human history; and as if those of us who would agree that it did, would be inclined to forget about it regardless.

We demand that society never forget the Holocaust— not necessarily our individual experiences of the Holocaust (most of us have none, after all) but, rather, to remember that it happened, that some people made it happen and other people allowed it to happen, and that the forces that led to that atrocity still exist, and still threaten to devour humanity. These are all verboten themes in memorializing 9/11, however. You dare not ask about the events that led to the attacks, because causality is irrelevant— they hate us for our freedom— or question the events that followed— you’re either with us or against us. Our collective memory of the Holocaust is not useful so much as a eulogy, but as a warning. Our collective memories of 9/11, however, are about being a part of an experience outside of context. It is about propagating a tribal mythology in which we are good and they are evil and terrorism against our nation will not stand.

Like the similar shared experiences of the assassinations of Kennedy and King, we engage in a process of sublimating our individual experiences into one great common anecdote. In the process, we achieve a unified sentiment, by necessity devoid of posture or prescription, re-lived as necessary to preserve the appropriate level of piety and deference that the event calls for, but with none of the pesky moral lessons. The tragedy exists for tragedy’s sake, and this is the only legitimate way of reflecting upon it.

Most of us alive now weren’t around for those assassinations, and an increasing number of us have little to no memory of September 11, 2001. But the more subversive realization is that this collective anecdote serves not to inform but to conform. Friends, Romans, countrymen, we are all one in this collective grief. Unity becomes more important than diversity, more important than liberty. You are encouraged to recollect the horrors you saw on television, or for an unfortunate few, outside your windows or down the street from you, or in your very office. What you are absolutely forbidden from, however, is advocacy, or sort of useful reflection. This is not the time for that.

Most of our personal stories are not relevant to the questions at hand. It is of no practical use to simply be a part of this mourning zeitgeist, except perhaps to fulfill a desperate desire to be connected to something which most of us were not. It doesn’t matter where I was on the morning of September 11, 2001 except as some personal proof that I was somewhere. But I wasn’t at Ground Zero or the Pentagon. I wasn’t rolling a cart up an airplane aisle. I wasn’t doing anything of import. I was, at best, a minute observer of a tragedy that happened to be televised live.

In the succeeding years, we’ve mobilized forces to reignite the Great Game, we’ve sent kids off to fight wars with the armies we have (rather than the armies we want). We’ve whisked individuals off to CIA black sites from which some never returned. We’ve tortured and murdered detainees and invented fancy euphemisms for it. We’ve read your emails and we’ve listened to your phone calls. We’ve renewed our state of emergency year after year. We’ve taken away your liquids and your dignity at airports in exchange for a kabuki theater of security. We are all complicit in these developments, for they happened under our watch.

This is what I want to remember every 9/11, and what I hope you will remember: that we allowed a tragedy of one day to become the tragedy of every day. That we allowed psychopaths to turn the horror we felt then into the horrors we perpetrate now.

I won’t ask where you were when you found out about the Abu Ghraib abuses, or when the Patriot Act was signed into law, or when you learned the technical details of waterboarding, or the countless day-to-day atrocities and abridgments of freedom that have been carried out not just with our silence but with our approval. Nor will I ask you to join me in silence to honor our dead liberties. I ask you only to contemplate and to discuss. To reflect and to debate. To argue, to object, to study, to review… to not remain silent, and to not suppress your reason with banal sentimentality. Fourteen years have passed, and it is no longer the time for that.

So, I’m assuming everyone who wants the government to prohibit any funding to Planned Parenthood because they do abortions, even though federal funds are segregated from any abortion services, is also in favor of cutting all federal grants and subsidies to any religiously-affiliated organization under the same principle, right?

What I’m looking for this election year is a moderate candidate who has an eye toward corporate interests, and a history of rescuing troubled businesses whom the market has left for dead. Someone who will take a hard line on foreign affairs, and on domestic policy, supports a requirement that everyone with means have health insurance or face a tax penalty.

I want an intelligent and educated candidate. A law degree from Harvard would be most desirable. Character-wise, it’s okay if he comes off detached and aloof in public, so long as he can inspire those he works with directly.

The only question left, then, is which of the two qualifying candidates to support?